THE FUTURE OF THE PAST: Representing the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Trauma in the 21st Century
6-8 July, 2014 Conference Website: http://futureofthepast2014.wordpress.com/
Venues Sunday 6 July Jewish Holocaust Centre, 13-15 Selwyn Street, Elsternwick, Melbourne Map: http://www.jhc.org.au/contact-us.html
Monday 7 July and Tuesday 8 July Deakin Prime (City Campus), Deakin University, Level 3, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne Map: http://deakinprime.com/contact-us/
‘To Burn’ (part 2) by Thomas Delohery
Conference Theme The proliferation of depictions of the Holocaust and other traumatic events in popular culture and elsewhere demands continued attention to the means by which complex human experiences are communicated to, and negotiated by, contemporary audiences. From Anne Rothe’s Popular Trauma Culture to Alvin H. Rosenfeld’s The End of the Holocaust, recent scholarship has engaged with the ethics of different representational strategies—strategies that become progressively diverse with expanding technological innovations. Yet many questions remain unanswered. Firstly, this conference aims to expose and explore key issues relating to the Holocaust, genocide and mass trauma, contributing to ongoing debates over historical and cultural representation. However, this event also intends to interrogate the ways in which these issues, questions, and debates are approached by exploring and expanding the relationship between scholars working in academia, practitioners working in related industries, and the community(s) to which they connect.
Conference Organising Committee Dr Adam Brown, Deakin University Danielle Christmas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dr Deb Waterhouse-Watson, Deakin University Katrina Skwarek, Jewish Holocaust Centre
Sponsors We would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for making this event possible.
PSFRG Processes of Signification Faculty Research Group, Deakin University
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General Advice Getting to the Venues Jewish Holocaust Centre 13-15 Selwyn Street, Elsternwick If travelling from the CBD, take the train from Flinders Street Station to Elsternwick Station. The train takes roughly 15 minutes and the JHC is a 2 minute walk from Elsternwick Station. For travel on all public transport, you must purchase a Myki money card ($6) from main train stations or 7-11 stores. Deakin Prime (City Campus) Level 3, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne Deakin Prime is a 5 minute walk up Bourke Street from Southern Cross Station. Press the lift button in the foyer to be directed to the appropriate lift number. Please note that this is not the Melbourne Burwood campus of Deakin University; this venue is in the CBD. Dinner Options for Sunday Night A variety of Elsternwick restaurants are within a 2 minute walk from the Jewish Holocaust Centre, including (among others):
Budapest (Hungarian), 273 Glen Huntly Road: http://budapest.com.au/ After the Tears (Polish), 9B Gordon Street: http://www.afterthetears.net/ Tataki (Japanese), 470 Glen Huntly Road: http://www.tataki.com.au/ Mexico City (Mexican), 313 Glen Huntly Road Ren Dao Vegetarian (Thai), 275 Glen Huntly Rd
Important Documents Included in Conference Packs for Speakers and Session Chairs
Consent Form for being identified in images and video stemming from the conference – please sign this if you are happy to be included in post-conference online materials.
Information for Session Chairs, including short bios organised by session, and time cards. All chairs will be asked to keep speakers strictly to time in fairness to all. 3
Program Sunday, 6 July Venue: Jewish Holocaust Centre 13-15 Selwyn St, Elsternwick 10.00 – 11.00am
Registration and Morning Tea Guided tours of the JHC Museum will be provided by JHC volunteers
11.00 – 11.20am
Welcome and Official Opening: Smorgon Auditorium (upstairs) Mr Warren Fineberg, Executive Director, Jewish Holocaust Centre The conference will be launched by Mr Michael Roux, The Honorary Consul General of Rwanda in Australia
11.20 – 11.40am
Introduction
The Future of Research – A Provocation and
A Conversation with a Holocaust Survivor Adam Brown, Deakin University, with Phillip Maisel OAM, Jewish Holocaust Centre 11.40 – 12.30pm
Special Guest Presentation
The Future of the Present: A presentation by members of the Darfur Australia Network Eltayeb Ali, genocide survivor and member of DAN Abdelhadi Matar, genocide survivor and member of DAN Sandra Chestnutt, DAN President and Chair of the Board 12.30 – 1.30pm
Lunch
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1.30 – 3.30pm
Plenary Panel: Smorgon Auditorium (upstairs)
The Future of the Past and the Ethics of Representation: A Discussion by/with Practitioners and Scholars Jayne Josem, Curator, Jewish Holocaust Centre Philip Cookson, CEO, Philology Pty. Ltd. Sally Morgan, Educator and founder of Rwandan Stories and Vanishing Point Avril Alba, University of Sydney Chair: Deb Waterhouse-Watson, Deakin University 3.30 – 4.00pm
Afternoon Tea
4.00 – 5.30pm
Session 1
Panel 1: Smorgon Auditorium (upstairs)
Sexing Up the Holocaust: Gender(ed) Representations Screening (out) Female Rescuers: Power, Sex, and Agency in Holocaust Films Deb Waterhouse-Watson, Deakin University Romancing the Holocaust? Love Stories and the Persecution of Jews Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University Failed Seduction and Thwarted Desire: Sex, Gender and Holocaust Memory in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice Julian Novitz, Swinburne University of Technology Chair: Elizabeth Ward, University of Leeds *
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Panel 2: Marejn Auditorium (downstairs)
Performing Traumatic Memories: From Stage to Screen Repurposing the Nazi, Inhabiting the Jew: ’Waking Up’ Rwanda in Urwintore’s The Investigation Danielle Christmas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Performing The Act of Killing (2012) Trent Griffiths, Deakin University Chair: Adam Brown, Deakin University
Dinner Break (see suggestions under General Advice, page 3) 7.00 – 9.00pm approx.
Smorgon Auditorium (upstairs)
Screening of Andrzej Munk’s Passenger (1963)
with a panel of guest speakers and interactive audience discussion Speakers: Matt Lawson, Edge Hill University Elizabeth Ward, University of Leeds Trent Griffiths, Deakin University Chair: Danielle Christmas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill With sincere thanks to Second Run DVD for making this event possible
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Monday, 7 July Venue: Deakin Prime (City Campus), Deakin University, Level 3, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne 9.00 – 9.30am
Coffee and catch-up
9.30 – 11.00am
Session 2
Panel 3: Conference Room
New Media, New Memories, New Ethics Lacuna Stories: Mending the Gaps in Knowledge of Major Historical Events through Narrative Collaboration Brian Johnsrud, Stanford University ‘A View from the Inside’: Testimony and the New Museum Ethics Jo Besley, University of Queensland Digital Media Innovation and Gamification in the Holocaust Museum: The Potentialities and Limitations of the JHC StoryPods Adam Brown, Deakin University Chair: Philip Cookson, Philology Pty. Ltd. *
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Panel 4: Theatre Room
Portraying Perpetrators: Mediating Complicity and Culpability The Adolf Eichmann Trial: The Creation of Holocaust Narratives in 1960s American Media Paul MacDonald, Macquarie University Exploring the Philosophical Underpinnings of Holocaust Themed Fiction: Reflections on the Banality of Evil in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro Ned Curthoys, University of Western Australia ‘That’s in the Past, but You Never Forget’: Remembering Trauma in the Oral Histories of British Former Child Migrants Gretel Evans, University of Melbourne Chair: Kirril Shields, University of Queensland 7
11.00 – 11.30am
Morning tea
11.30 – 1.00pm
Session 3
Panel 5: Conference Room
Through the Camera’s Gaze: Rethinking Holocaust Cinema Film Music as Holocaust Memorialisation in the 21st Century Matt Lawson, Edge Hill University A Twenty-First Century Fairytale of the Holocaust: Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012) Elizabeth Ward, University of Leeds Silencing the Word Shaker: Adaptation and Absentation in The Book Thief LJ Maher, Deakin University Chair: Jo Besley, University of Queensland 1.00 – 2.00pm
Lunch
2.00 – 3.00pm
Session 4
Panel 6: Conference Room
Unconventional Imaging: Negotiating Trauma in/through Film ‘Oblivion Will Begin with Your Eyes’: The Spatial Technologies of Hiroshima mon amour Kim Roberts, Deakin University Fascism, Anti-Semitism and the Roald Dahl Connection: Ken Hughes’ Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) Adrian Schober, Monash University Chair: Matt Lawson, Edge Hill University *
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Panel 7: Theatre Room
Understanding Trauma Cultures and Identities Media, Trauma and Biopolitics Allen Meek, Massey University Music as a Factor of Representation and Self-representation of Deportees in Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos Alessandro Carrieri, University of Trieste Chair: Esther Jilovsky, University of Melbourne 3.00 – 3.30pm
Afternoon tea
3.30 – 5.00pm
Session 5
Conference Room Panel 8
Remembering Rwanda: 20 Years On... Representations of Remembrance: An Analysis of Contemporary Artworks Representing the Events of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide Laura De Becker, University of the Witwatersrand ‘The Whites Made Up Those Differences Between Us’: Representations of History in Graphic Novels about the Rwandan Genocide Deborah Mayersen, University of Wollongong Ethics in Pedagogical Genocide Representation: The ‘Use’ of Rwandan Genocide Stories in Classrooms Sally Morgan, Educator and founder of Rwandan Stories and Vanishing Point Chair: Danielle Christmas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Tuesday, 8 July Venue: Deakin Prime (City Campus), Deakin University, Level 3, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne 9.30 – 10.00am
Coffee and catch-up
10.00 – 11.30am
Session 6
Panel 9: Conference Room
Literary Interventions: Writing the Holocaust ‘In the Novelist’s Crucible’: The Power of Holocaust Literature and the Child Perspective Lia Deromedi, University of London Holocaust Memory in the Third Generation: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost and Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love Esther Jilovsky, University of Melbourne Victim, Bystander, or Perpetrator?: The Inversion of Traditional Portrayals of the Third Reich Triad in Australian Fiction Kirril Shields, University of Queensland Chair: Ned Curthoys, University of Western Australia 11.30 – 12.00pm
Morning tea
12.00 – 1.00pm
Session 7
Panel 10: Conference Room
Remnants of the Past: The Politics of Commemoration Human Remains and the Memory of Colonial Genocide in British Museums Tom Lawson, Northumbria University
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The 1961 Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration Exhibition, Melbourne Steven Cooke, Deakin University Chair: Avril Alba, University of Sydney *
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Panel 11: Theatre Room
Stories of Darkness and Light: Exploring Trauma in Testimonies ‘This Story Does Not End’: Past, Future and Irony in the Works of Aldo Zargani Mirna Cicioni, Monash University ‘An Unbridgeable Gulf’: Memoirs and Memory in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust Writings Sean Sidky, University of Sydney Chair: Trent Griffiths, Deakin University 1.00 – 2.00pm
Lunch
2.00 – 3.30pm
Session 8
Panel 12: Conference Room
Memory, Art, and Identity in the 21st Century Je m’appelle Dreyfus, je suis juive (My name is Dreyfus, I am a Jew). Sites/Sights of Trauma: Autobiography, Photography and Representation Ella Dreyfus, National Art School, Sydney Remembering Vichy in Vichy Audrey Mallet, Concordia University Re-inking the Skin: Affective Spaces of Holocaust Representation Jemma Hefter, University of Melbourne Chair: Brian Johnsrud, Stanford University 3.30 – 4.00pm
Afternoon tea
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4.00 – 5.00pm
Session 9
Reflection and open discussion forum Conference Room
Reflecting on The Future of the Past Speaker:
Avril Alba, University of Sydney
Chair:
Deb Waterhouse-Watson, Deakin University
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Wednesday, 9 July
SPECIAL EVENT in partnership with the JHC Film Club Venue: Jewish Holocaust Centre 13-15 Selwyn St, Elsternwick
FREE ENTRY 7.00 – 10.00pm approx.
Screening of Stefan Ruzowitzky’s
The Counterfeiters (2007) With refreshments, a guest speaker, and interactive audience discussion Speakers: John Fox, Victoria University Chair: Adam Brown, Deakin University This provocative, Academy Award-winning film is based on the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis in 1936. Depicting the ethical dilemmas confronting a group of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen, the film asks the question: ‘What would you do to survive?’ With many thanks to Amalgamated Movies for making this event possible.
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Abstracts Sunday, 6 July Jewish Holocaust Centre
4.00 – 5.30pm Panel 1, Smorgon Auditorium (upstairs)
Sexing Up the Holocaust: Gender(ed) Representations Screening (out) Female Rescuers: Power, Sex, and Agency in Holocaust Films Deb Waterhouse-Watson, Deakin University This paper examines the portrayal of female Gentile rescuers in two Eastern European Holocaust films, Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness (Poland, 2011) and Jan Hrebejk’s Divided We Fall (Czech Republic, 2000). To varying degrees, both of these productions disrupt conventional narratives of selfless heroism and avoid the eroticised objectification of women common in many (particularly American) Holocaust films. Nevertheless, a detailed analysis reveals that they also serve to marginalise or erase women’s roles as rescuers, either in preference to narratives of dominative masculine heroism or to undertake a politico-religious appropriation of the Holocaust, each of which implicitly excludes and exploits the feminine. In both cases, the films trivialise women’s particular and complex historical experiences, including sexual violence, and subordinate them to masculine interests.
Romancing the Holocaust? Love Stories and the Persecution of Jews Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University Representations of the Holocaust have been problematic ever since Theodor Adorno argued that ‘to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Yet artists continue to represent the Holocaust in fiction and film while critics persist in questioning these representations or even challenging the right of artists to portray the unspeakable. This paper explores four love stories which use romantic relationships to portray the Nazi persecution of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s: Eva Ibbotson’s romance novel The Morning Gift (1993), Edith H. Beer’s memoir The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust (1999), the critically acclaimed Dutch film Black Book (2006), and Pam Jenoff’s highly problematic romance novel The Kommandant’s Girl (2007). All four stories focus on female Jewish protagonists who flee their homes and who use their romantic relationships with men (Nazi officers in three cases) to survive or to mount resistance against Nazi rule. These love stories raise the following questions about how the Holocaust can and should be represented: Can the Shoah be romantic? Is it ever appropriate to use the Holocaust as a backdrop to a romantic love story? And if so, who is an appropriate romantic hero or heroine? This paper explores the ethics of Holocaust romance and considers the kinds of history which are produced in these works. 14
Failed Seduction and Thwarted Desire: Sex, Gender and Holocaust Memory in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice Julian Novitz, Swinburne University of Technology Both published in 1979, following one of the great peaks in American public interest in the Holocaust, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice are novels that both grapple with the role of Holocaust memory in post-War life in ways that have continued relevance for current fictional engagements with the subject matter. Furthermore, the novels possess striking similarities at the level of plot, theme, characterisation and structure that were not remarked upon at the time of their publication and seldom addressed in subsequent criticism. In this paper I consider one particularly interesting and problematic point of comparison: that in both novels the Bildungsroman of a young American male writer is progressed or completed through their engagement with the narrative of a female Holocaust survivor. My contention is that the particular roles that the characters in both novels take on in relation to sexual desire and various kinds of traumatic memory are most powerfully explicated in key scenes where desired sexual acts, romance or seduction are prevented or withheld. The ways in which the scenes or movements are presented typify the two authors’ differing approaches to the complex questions of gender, exploitation and Holocaust memory. *
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4.00 – 5.30pm Panel 2, Marejn Auditorium (downstairs)
Performing Traumatic Memories: From Stage to Screen Repurposing the Nazi, Inhabiting the Jew: ‘Waking Up’ Rwanda in Urwintore’s The Investigation Danielle Christmas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I worked with just words, the words of the victim’s evidence, to wake these things up for us so that we could investigate them. – Peter Weiss, author of The Investigation In 2009, an acting troupe of Rwandan genocide survivors developed a travelling production of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965). Weiss’s original reconstruction of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials figuratively and literally interrogates the problematic figures of perpetrator, victim, and bystander writ-large, using witness testimony to negotiate the meaning of justice and reconciliation in a post-atrocity state. While the original play is innovative, the Rwandan performance is even more remarkable for the defamiliarising context provided by the cast’s deliberately defined identities, an artistic technique that invokes the same problems circumscribed in the original play – theorising and implementing post-genocide justice and reconciliation – for a new postcolonial landscape. This paper argues that this repurposing and inhabiting of the Holocaust – which works to layer Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, and colonial subjectivities – is a dynamic re-envisioning of Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory. Ultimately, this paper shows how the performative reinvention of Nazi and 15
Jewish subjectivities comments on the fraught relations between a postcolonial state – adapting Western art to new ends – and the Western metropole – which itself has perpetrated atrocities in the postcolonial landscape.
Performing The Act of Killing (2012) Trent Griffiths, Deakin University Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing deals with issues of genocide, guilt, and societal complicity in an utterly unique way, using the apparatus of documentary film to confront the present with repressed memories of the past. Most startlingly, Oppenheimer enlists the perpetrators responsible for the death and disappearance of nearly one million Indonesians in 1965 and 1966 to recreate their murders in the style of their favourite Hollywood genre. These scenes form the backbone of a much more complex look at the dark past of Indonesia, refracted through the unsettling grandstanding of men who are still enjoying the spoils. In doing so, The Act of Killing thrusts to the forefront of social consciousness a repressed past, destabilising the concerted efforts of nearly 50 years of cultural discourse to rewrite the events as a triumphant birth of nationalism.
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Monday, 7 July Deakin Prime (City Campus), Deakin University
9.30 – 11.00am Panel 3, Conference Room
New Media, New Memories, New Ethics Lacuna Stories: Mending the Gaps in Knowledge of Major Historical Events through Narrative Collaboration Brian Johnsrud, Standford University Interpreting complex phenomena through various media is critical in today’s information-rich world. The Lacuna Stories Project creates an exploratory, interactive, and collaborative online space for users to research and discuss significant historical events like 9/11. Lacuna Stories extends current digital annotation software functionality to encourage skills such as historical thinking, close reading, and comparison of media concerning 9/11. Lacuna Stories’ subtitle ‘mend the truth’ refers to users’ ability to connect annotated documents, fiction, scholarship, wikis, and user-generated forums and blogs in novel ways. When approached independently, individual sources, genres, and media inevitably fall short of stitching together the ‘whole story’. Lacuna Stories’ diverse, multi-media environment provides tools for instructors, students, and the general public to ‘mend’ the gaps in knowledge of major historical events and develop their own narratives. User data generated through the site’s design will allow researchers to better understand new reading and engagement behaviours of the site’s diverse users. The Lacuna Stories Project is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Stanford, UCLA, and MIT that includes faculty whose research interests span literature, cultural memory, pedagogy, historical thinking, public humanities, and platform studies. By the time of the conference, Amir Eshel (codirector) and Brian Johnsrud (co-director) will have taught a course, ‘Futurity: Why the Past Matters’, during Stanford’s Winter Quarter, in which students use the Lacuna Stories Platform in and outside the classroom. This paper discusses how the prototype encouraged student learning and collaboration by presenting our data gathered from student use, interviews, and focus groups. By the time of the conference we will also have piloted Lacuna Stories for a test-group of up to 30 public users without a college degree, to compare experiences of different kinds of users in and out of the classroom, with and without formal academic training in approaching different kinds of historical texts and media. ‘A View from the Inside’: Testimony and the New Museum Ethics Jo Besley, University of Queensland Museums are increasingly sites of dialogue about traumatic pasts, taking on the role of mediators, ‘working through’ issues with high political and social stakes. This has involved a significant shift away from history as the preferred means for interpreting the past, towards modes of memory and testimony that give voice to victims and survivors. 17
Previously seen as unreliable, memory is now perceived as the key to creating ethical representations of the past, and trauma in particular. In Aleida Assmann’s terms, memory is ‘a view from the inside’. By providing encounters with memory, museums seek to establish empathic identification with victims on the part of audiences. Empathy, it is assumed, fosters ethical thinking, tolerance, deeper understanding and even healing, furthering social change. Video testimony is one of the foremost representational strategies being used in the pursuit of empathy by contemporary museums. In this paper I will explore the use of video testimony in the exhibition Remembering Goodna: stories from a Queensland mental hospital presented at the Museum of Brisbane in 2007-08 to examine how video is changing the ethics of museum practice. The paper will probe the limits and risks of empathy as well as its benefits. Digital Media Innovation and Gamification in the Holocaust Museum: The Potentialities and Limitations of the JHC StoryPods Adam Brown, Deakin University This paper critically examines the implications of digital media for the remembrance of the Holocaust in contemporary museum spaces, a development that has seen fundamental shifts in thinking around agency, education, and entertainment. Expanding existing discussions of this issue into the Australian context, I take as a central case study the design and integration of interactive StoryPod screen media in Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre. Addressing both the limitations and potentialities of interactive digital technologies for facilitating visitor-viewsers’ engagement with survivor stories, the analysis highlights that interactive screen media can be used to complement and enhance – rather than replace – traditional artefact and photographic displays, and plays an integral role in the Holocaust museums of the future.
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9.30 – 11.00am Panel 4, Theatre Room
Portraying Perpetrators: Mediating Complicity and Culpability The Adolf Eichmann Trial: The Creation of Holocaust Narratives in 1960s American Media Paul MacDonald, Macquarie University The capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann have been considered a watershed of Holocaust remembrance, a catalyst for a paradigm shift in how both academics across many disciplines and the general public viewed the horrors of the extermination camps and the regime that gave rise to them. Coverage of the trial by media organisations has formed the basis for some research into the trial’s proceedings, outcomes, and aftermath, but for the most part the importance of the trial as an event in Holocaust historiography has simply been assumed, rather than examined. This paper seeks to demonstrate how coverage of the trial by the United States periodicals New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Time could have led to 18
quite differing interpretations of the trial and its revelations about the Holocaust amongst readers, and to introduce a more nuanced approach to how we, as historians and interdisciplinary scholars, should evaluate the Eichmann trial as an important moment in Holocaust remembrance.
Exploring the Philosophical Underpinnings of Holocaust Themed Fiction: Reflections on the Banality of Evil in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro Ned Curthoys, University of Western Australia In a 2008 article, the political theorist Richard J. Bernstein pondered the ongoing critical significance of Arendt’s controversial notion of the ‘banality of evil’. Bernstein argues ominously that the ‘bureaucratic and technological conditions of modernity’ make the phenomenon of monstrous deeds committed by seemingly normal people a ‘much more likely and dangerous possibility’. Given that investigations into the banality of evil invoke historical reflection, social critique, and dystopian forecasts, it is no accident her provocative observation has proved a congenial theme for Holocaust themed fiction increasingly interested in the psychology of perpetrators. Authors including Kazuo Ishiguro and J.M. Coetzee have been stimulated by Arendt’s observation that evil actions can arise as much from the shallowness and thoughtlessness of the perpetrator embedded within a conformist, routinised, and instrumentalist social structure as from recognisably voluntarist motivations such as ideological fanaticism. In this paper I will argue that two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let me Go (2005) dramatise Arendt’s insight that in the post-war world the moral will can no longer be represented in Kantian terms as merely the executor of reason’s lawful deliberations. In Ishiguro’s haunting novels, characters perpetrate monstrous deeds because of self-deception, misguided idealism, a tenacious ingroup mentality, or because the prevailing political vocabulary allows them to redescribe their actions in bureaucratic or even altruistic terms. I suggest that, in Kazuo’s writings, ethical deliberation and the practice of social and intellectual virtue must be rescued from a process of normative inferential reasoning that is internal to a particular social or professional code of value. The narrators of Ishiguro’s novels intimate that, in Judith Butler’s terms, to ‘give an account of oneself’ as a narrative activity is to be interrupted and addressed by a variety of repressed insights and regenerative drives that record the impingements of our relational and sensate vulnerabilities. By interrogating the linguistic and social matrices that underwrite a spectrum of injustices, Ishiguro’s novels can contribute to an evolving body of theory, partially indebted to Arendt’s concept, that explores why so many individuals and institutions continue to behave without moral restraint. ‘That’s in the Past, but You Never Forget’: Remembering Trauma in the Oral Histories of British Former Child Migrants Gretel Evans, University of Melbourne Around 4,000 children were transported from Britain to Australia post-World War Two as part of various child migration schemes. While child migration schemes had existed previously, they were reintroduced in Australia in 1947 and continued until around 1967. The schemes were designed to assist children of lower socio-economic backgrounds. Children were often recruited from British institutions and orphanages and sent out to Australia whereupon they were placed in various farm schools, institutions and orphanages. In the late 1980s the child migration schemes were ‘rediscovered’ by Margaret Humphreys and there 19
was a push to reunite former child migrants with lost families in Britain. As part of the 2009 Australian government apology to the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, the National Library of Australia conducted an oral history project to document the experiences of these people. This paper focuses on these oral history recordings, and utilises memory studies to examine how former child migrants remember and reconstruct past traumatic experiences. Past experiences of trauma are often remembered and articulated during the remembering process, arguably because of the Government Apology. These memories and the oral histories of former child migrants, demonstrate how past traumas can persist into the present.
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11.30am – 1.00pm Panel 5, Conference Room
Through the Camera’s Gaze: Rethinking Holocaust Cinema Film Music as Holocaust Memorialisation in the 21st Century Matt Lawson, Edge Hill University Holocaust representation through film has received much academic attention, with a focus on how cinematography and narrative may assist our memorialisation process. One aspect of film which has received little academic attention is the music. The musical score is an extremely popular but also manipulative aspect of any film, and can make an audience laugh, cry or completely alter their perception of the narrative. What place does film music have in Holocaust films? Are there ethical issues with a musical score which may subconsciously but significantly manipulate our emotional reactions to the dark period of history being represented on screen? Does the country of origin of the film and their underlying approaches to Holocaust legacy affect our perception? Does the choice of composer have an impact? Through a comparison of 21st century Holocaust films including The Grey Zone (2001), Fateless (2005), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) and an episode from the television series Band of Brothers (2001), I will examine the impact which the musical score has upon our perception of particular scenes, and begin to investigate some of the questions which emerge from this previously unexplored field of Holocaust representational research.
A Twenty-First Century Fairytale of the Holocaust: Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012) Elizabeth Ward, University of Leeds Although the image of the Brothers Grimm disappearing into the German forest to gather their now-famous collection of fairytales may in itself be a romantic distortion of the past, the image of the sixteen-year-old Lore disappearing into the Bavarian forest in Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012) has all the makings of a traditional German fairytale. 20
Whilst Shortland’s film comprises many visual and narrative allusions to the Grimm fairytales, her central concern is nevertheless very much a twenty-first century issue. At the heart of the fairytale is the centrality of oral transmission through the generations and Lore is not about confronting the events of the Holocaust, but rather the narrative of the Jewish persecution. By considering how communities transmit narratives and prejudices, Lore not only explores how German society came to accept a standard presentation of Jews, but also appeals to contemporary events by highlighting the role of public, state and media narratives in the creation of images of the enemy. By considering how Shortland draws on the fairytale motif, I argue that Lore provides a powerful critique not only of how victims and perpetrators were constructed in the Third Reich, but also in the twenty-first century.
Silencing the Word Shaker: Adaptation and Absentation in The Book Thief LJ Maher, Deakin University In early 2014 Markus Zusak’s award winning novel The Book Thief was released as a cinematic adaptation. This highly acclaimed novel about the Holocaust was reimagined by Brian Percival (About a Girl, Downton Abbey), and the screenplay was adapted by Michael Petroni (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawntreader, Queen of the Damned). The cinematic release received muted praise, described as ‘respectable’ but ‘plodding’ and ‘not inspired’, and as ‘[softening] the impact of a very impressive book’, leaving it a ‘noble’ disappointment that ‘errs on the side of caution’. The film has most notably been softly criticised by Zusak himself for its elision of the moments of truth that he wove into an otherwise fictional narrative, moments drawn from his parents’ lived experiences in Germany during the Second World War. It also absents the stories written by the Jewish character, Max Vandenburg, The Standover Man and The Wordshaker. These narratives are illustrated within The Book Thief, providing a moment where the reader can look through Liesel’s dangerous, brown eyes, and connect with Max as more than a synechdoche for the Sho’ah. In this paper I will consider the narratological and ethical ramifications of these absentions in the adaptation, with a mind to both their position as mediated life-writing, and fictionalised fictions.
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2.00 – 3.00pm Panel 6, Conference Room
Unconventional Imaging: Negotiating Trauma in/through Film ‘Oblivion Will Begin with Your Eyes’: The Spatial Technologies of Hiroshima mon amour Kim Roberts, Deakin University After working for months on what was to be a documentary about the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima by Allied Forces, director Alain Resnais came to the conclusion that a change of direction was required. Convinced that his efforts would only result in a reproduction of his 21
earlier film about the Nazi death camps, Night and Fog, Resnais changed his representational tack. The result was Hiroshima mon amour, a full-length feature film that was explicitly fictional or, as Resnasis’ collaborator, novelist cum script-writer, Marguerite Duras, was to put it: ‘a false documentary’. Released fifty-five years ago, Hiroshima mon amour, continues to pose challenges to those of us who come belatedly, at a historical and geographical remove, to grapple with the traumatic events and spaces of World War II. For what is it that we who stand outside the event and yet within its affective range possibly see? This paper will consider this problematic through an investigation of the spatial technologies of the film and screenplay. In doing so Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of geophilosophy and Deleuze’s figuring of technology will be drawn upon to explore the ‘incommensurable regions’ (Deleuze, Cinema 2) of the film: regions of memory, vision, place and proximity. Fascism, Anti-Semitism and the Roald Dahl Connection: Ken Hughes’ Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) Adrian Schober, Monash University In the mythical land of Vulgaria from Ken Hughes’ British musical/comedy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), children have been outlawed and the evil Baron and Baroness rule through terror and intimidation. This land bears all the hallmarks of a police state: a curious amalgam of the German Empire and Nazi Germany, where absolute monarchy meets noticeably modern forms of fascism and despotism. As co-scripted by children’s author Roald Dahl with director Hughes, and loosely based on Ian Fleming’s stories about an extraordinary car, the ‘fascist’ theme troublingly intersects with anti-Semitic and Holocaust discourses, allusions and innuendos. This reveals a rather sinister ideological agenda that ties in with Dahl’s openly anti-Semitic politics and attitudes. In this paper, I shall address how this anti-Semitism centres on and around the inscrutable figure of the Child Catcher, who may be simultaneously read as Jew hunter and malevolent, shapeshifting, child-hating Jew. Yet I will show how the character is a composite image, culled by Dahl and Hughes from various influences and sources such as fairytale and folklore, anti-Semitic literature and propaganda (namely, the blood libel narrative), while drawing on Shakespearean dramatic modes. In elaborating two competing subtexts in the film it may be seen that the Child Catcher is ideologically at odds with itself.
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2.00 – 3.00pm Panel 7, Theatre Room
Understanding Trauma Cultures and Identities Media, Trauma and Biopolitics Allen Meek, Massey University Writing about the video testimony of Holocaust survivors, Amit Pinchevski has asked whether cultural trauma narratives are a response to the demands of historical responsibility or to the effects of technological media. This paper argues that such a question can only be answered by considering the relation of media to discourses about the health and survival of race, nation and species. Holocaust footage and testimony has been thought to potentially transmit traumatic memory to the viewer (Lanzmann, Hirsch). Media images are also thought to anesthetise public response. Both approaches define media audiences in terms of collective pathologies. Cultural trauma narratives articulate ‘the people’ in terms of national/ethnic sovereignty and ‘traumatic’ events as social and psychic wounds, ruptures in the body politic. The prominence of the Holocaust in contemporary culture has lead some critics to propose that it supports new forms of ‘cosmopolitan’ identifications (Levy and Sznaider), serves as a ‘moral universal’ (Alexander), or is embedded in a more complex process of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg). But can trauma narratives avoid re-inscribing forms of social exclusion? This paper proposes that we must confront both the role of media and biopower in trauma narratives if we wish to understand their real social and political implications. Music as a Factor of Representation and Self-representation of Deportees in Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos Alessandro Carrieri, University of Trieste In Holocaust studies, the subject of music appears to be marginal and, if compared to others, less importance is attributed to it. However, musical activity was a constant presence in the reality of concentration camps and ghettos and its role is vital in the complex and tangled subject of memory and representation. My contribution intends to provide this perspective, through the analysis of the function of music in relation to the representation of Holocaust memory, focusing on two different aspects of memory. The first concerns imposed music, an instrument of oppression, and it comes from direct and indirect testimonies of deportees and survivors. This kind of music is defined as the Voice of the Lager. The second involves self-organised music, meaning organised by the deportees themselves that reached the present day. In this case, music is an act of resistance, of protest, of political, cultural and spiritual action, thus representing a historical document. This kind of music is defined as the Voice of the Victims. In my contribution I also intend to analyse the ability of music to re-create the past, making the compositions written in concentration camps and ghettos’ documents of memory, where the ineffable and the lost can be re-discovered.
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3.30 – 5.00pm Panel 8, Conference Room
Remembering Rwanda: 20 Years On... Representations of Remembrance: An Analysis of Contemporary Artworks Representing the Events of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide Laura De Becker, University of the Witwatersrand In 1994, an estimated one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in the small CentralAfrican country of Rwanda. After the end of the genocide, the newly created Government of National Unity embarked on an extensive program of reconciliation for the country, part of which constituted the establishment of museums and memorials working through the memory of the genocide. One such lieux de mémoire is the Contemporary Arts Museum at Rwesero, opened in 2006 to promote and stimulate Rwandan artistry. A significant number of the works on display in this museum pertain to the events of 1994, either representing the violence of the conflict or dealing with its aftermath in contemporary Rwanda. These works inform us about the ways in which Rwandan artists are representing the conflict for display in their own country. Conversely, international artists such as Alfredo Jaar (Chile), George Gittoes (Australia) and Kofi Setordji (Ghana) have created ‘memorial’ artworks to the Rwandan genocide. Naturally, these artists have a different relationship to the genocidal killings and their artworks are intended to be seen by different audiences and made for a different market. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse these works in their own right. This paper proposes to draw a comparison between these two groups of artists – those creating works for ‘Rwandan consumption’ and those creating art for the international market. As this research will show, this locality is significant, because the political climate in Rwanda remains stifling towards artistic freedom of representation. Artists working for nonRwandan audiences and institutions can therefore be more critical in their memorywork than those working within the country. This paper will indicate and analyse these differences and draw conclusions which are consequential for the national reconciliation project that is still ongoing in Rwanda today. ‘The Whites Made Up Those Differences Between Us’: Representations of History in Graphic Novels about the Rwandan Genocide Deborah Mayersen, University of Wollongong In recent years, several graphic novels have been published about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. These include Deogratias (by Jean-Philippe Stassen), Smile through the Tears (by Rupert Bazambanza) and 100 Days in the Land of the Thousand Hills, an official publication of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In communicating the events of the genocide, each graphic novel has presented a particular interpretation of Rwanda’s history of colonialism, ethnic relations and events leading up to its outbreak. Within the sparse text 24
afforded by the graphic novel format, authors have rejected the myths about Rwanda’s history that they consider contributed to the genocide. Yet the alternative historical narratives they present arguably contribute to creating new historical myths. In this presentation I will analyse the way in which graphic novelists have sought to represent and explain Rwanda’s history, utilising both text and images. I will explore the benefits and limitations of the graphic novel format as a mode through which to present a complex historical narrative.
Ethics in Pedagogical Genocide Representation: The ‘Use’ of Rwandan Genocide Stories in Classrooms Sally Morgan, Rwandan Stories This paper will explore the limitations of representation as it applies to the sharing of genocide stories in senior secondary curriculum. It will examine the importance of place and context in both the ‘story’ and the ‘audience’ and the centrality of practitioner integrity as an often hidden but key factor in facilitating either a useful or a destructive learning process. Informed by reflections on the work done by Vanishing Point over a 3 year period in Australian education, this paper will explore the tension between the importance of ‘speaking’ - being part of the mediated process of survivors bearing witness - and the dangers of appropriating and exploiting others’ trauma for a variety of our own ends. With a focus on personal and pedagogical ethics, it will both interrogate and reaffirm the importance of representation as a flawed but necessary foundation for global trauma-recovery and peacebuilding. Finally, it will present conclusions about the productivity of this risky educational space, and the moral grounds and pitfalls of practicing genocide education using representations of the Rwandan genocide within core secondary curriculum.
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Tuesday, 8 July Deakin Prime (City Campus), Deakin University
10.00 – 11.30am Panel 9, Conference Room
Literary Interventions: Writing the Holocaust ‘In the Novelist’s Crucible’: The Power of Holocaust Literature and the Child Perspective Lia Deromedi, University of London The paper suggests that one of the ways to confront the challenges of imaginative Holocaust representations, and reinforce its importance, is through the child’s voice and viewpoint. The creative arts can be an opportunity for people across generations, education levels, countries, religions, cultures, languages, genders, and interests to engage in a difficult subject they might otherwise avoid. Aesthetic literature can also memorialise experiences through the combination of historical or autobiographical documentation with fictional imagination. Specifically, I argue that narratives written from the child’s perspective facilitate availability and new insight into the subject. Early criticism focused on whether the imagination was sufficient to undertake Holocaust representation and representation of atrocity in general whilst remaining historically faithful. New questions of literature’s possibility and ethics are now arising. As survivor narratives gradually can no longer be produced, we look to second and third generation authors who have the ability to connect the Holocaust to a current cultural context and regenerate the Holocaust imaginatively. This paper suggests that literary Holocaust representations, particularly narratives with a child’s viewpoint, can act as a gateway to awareness of other past and present conflicts, whilst continually reinvigorating Holocaust memory for future generations.
Holocaust Memory in the Third Generation: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost and Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love Esther Jilovsky, University of Melbourne As the last generation to know Holocaust survivors personally, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors – the third generation – will witness the transformation of the Holocaust as it fades from living memory. Third generation Holocaust texts often describe the death or approaching death of the narrator’s survivor grandparents; they focus on what is lost and not known, rather than what is known. This paper will analyse The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (2006) and An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorján (2009) to illustrate how the narrators’ memory of their grandparents validates their connection to the Holocaust even though the texts rely on sources such as interviews, archival research and inevitably, imagination and fantasy, to compensate for the lack of living witnesses. Both written after the authors’ grandparents passed away, The Lost and An Exclusive Love 26
simultaneously address the loss of this living link and bear witness to the narrator’s memory of their grandparents. This paper will argue that these texts indicate how third generation memoirs differ from survivor testimony as well as second generation Holocaust memoirs: although the link to the Holocaust has already become tenuous in the third generation, it is this generation which bridges Holocaust survivors and the future. Victim, Bystander, or Perpetrator?: The Inversion of Traditional Portrayals of the Third Reich Triad in Australian Fiction Kirril Shields, University of Queensland My paper will discuss culturally distinctive representations of the Third Reich victim, bystander and perpetrator as located in Australian fiction, and contends that social and historic conditions in Australia have fostered such representations. I argue that the composition of the three character types can be seen as adhering to literary ‘shifts and changes’ noted in German literature, which include similar characterisations, yet due to cultural and historical influences, these shifts and changes have been progressed in Australia. Scholars who study German literature containing the victim, bystander and perpetrator suggest that German literary depictions, as noted in authors such as Günter Grass or Bernhard Schlink, reflect and/or respond to historical shifts and changes in Germany and/or Europe. Australia’s representation of the Third Reich triad mirrors, to an extent, such German/European literary occurrences; however, I progress this theoretical and textual analysis by arguing that Australia’s cultural heritage alongside the nation’s social and political past in regards to the Holocaust have forged further shifts and changes. This has led to contentious, sometimes anti-Semitic variations in representations of the Third Reich victim, bystander and perpetrator in Australian fiction, whereby the traditional victim is depicted as a perpetrator, and the traditional perpetrator is portrayed as victim.
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12.00 – 1.00pm Panel 10, Conference Room
Remnants of the Past: The Politics of Commemoration Human Remains and the Memory of Colonial Genocide in British Museums Tom Lawson, Northumbria University British museums displayed the remains of victims of genocide throughout the late 19 th and 20th centuries. These remains were typically displayed as evidence of racial differentiation and usually used to construct a story of British racial superiority. This paper seeks to analyse this practice by concentrating on the remains of indigenous Tasmanians displayed in Britain – offering an analysis of their representation. I will argue that British museum culture of displaying remains actually represents an example of a perpetrator society using and acknowledging genocide in the construction of its own identities. The remains of the dead were, for example, invariably accompanied by accounts of indigenous Tasmanian 27
extermination. In the 21st century, those remains have been the subject of a vigorous campaign for return by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, and the second half of the paper will analyse the discourse around their return. I argue that the kind of arguments deployed against return by some sections of the British museum community betrayed an enduring colonial ideology and were thus evidence of a failure to come to terms with the presence of genocide in the British past.
The 1961 Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration Exhibition, Melbourne Steven Cooke, Deakin University This paper examines the origins, development and reception of the Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration Exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, held in April 1961. Situated within the context of the Eichmann trial in Israel and fears of racism in Australia, the exhibition is a site through which complex debates over Australian-Jewish identity and memory of the Holocaust can be understood. The exhibition was visited by over 6000 people in four days and employed a variety of contemporary museum techniques, including displays of art and material culture relating to the Holocaust, a replica ‘tomb of the unknown Jewish Martyr’ and ‘living history’ displays of life in post war Australia. The paper shows how representations of the Holocaust were shaped by both local concerns and an emerging global network of information, artefacts, people, and institutions involved in remembrance. It explores the politics of the development of the exhibition, the poetics of its displays, the part played by survivors, and the role of other cultural and educational institutions in Melbourne. Contrasting this exhibition with another Warsaw Ghetto exhibition held in London at the same time, it examines issues of ‘race’, identity and belonging within the context of a rapidly changing post-colonial society, adding to a nuanced reading that unsettles the established narratives of the development of historical memory of the Holocaust in Australia.
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12.00 – 1.00pm Panel 11, Theatre Room
Stories of Darkness and Light: Exploring Trauma in Testimonies ‘This Story Does Not End’: Past, Future and Irony in the Works of Aldo Zargani Mirna Cicioni, Monash University Aldo Zargani (Turin, 1933 –) is one of the most interesting Italian authors of Holocaustrelated testimony. The author of two memoirs and several stories and essays, he is known to English-speaking readers through his first autobiographical narrative, For Solo Violin (published in Italy in 1995 and translated into English in 2004). His representations of his survival as a child after the 1938 Italian Race Laws and between 1943 and 1945 in Germanoccupied Piedmont establish a direct dialogue with the implied readers through a variety of narrative strategies. Past and present are linked through subject association; footnotes and 28
textual digressions provide information on Italian history, children’s books, films and songs in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as explanations of Italian Jewish cultures, current scientific theories and references to the author’s present. Contradictions and problems are constantly foregrounded by the use of irony. I look primarily at texts by Zargani which have been translated into English, namely For Solo Violin and some stories which the translators are in the process of submitting to Australian publishers. My analysis draws on the work of Italian historians, such as David Bidussa and Alberto Cavaglion, who investigate ways in which memory can become ‘post-memory’: collective knowledge for the future. ‘An Unbridgeable Gulf’: Memoirs and Memory in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust Writings Sean Sidky, University of Sydney ‘Between the survivor’s memory and its reflection in words, his own included, lies an unbridgeable gulf’. – Elie Wiesel Perhaps the most emblematic representative of Holocaust survivors in the English-speaking world, Wiesel and his writings – particularly Night – have had a greater impact on the nonJewish world’s understanding of the survivor experience than any other. Despite this, there has been little research into the nature and development of Wiesel’s own memoirs. Indeed, due to what Peter Novick has called the ‘cult of the survivor as secular saint’, (a view espoused by Wiesel) survivor testimony and memoir are often seen as both unmediated historical texts, and indecipherable to non-witnesses. In order to address this issue, I will examine three iterations of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoirs, spanning a period of fifty years. First published in Yiddish in Argentina, then adapted by Wiesel himself into French as La Nuit, and finally re-written, some forty years later, in All Rivers Run to the Sea. Each of these memoirs recalls the same experiences, but from a different perspective, and with a new focus. Wiesel’s memoirs are not simply an unmediated account of his Holocaust experiences, but are remembrances viewed through his long and complex post-Holocaust experience; they are, too, an attempt to reconcile present beliefs with past experience. *
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2.00 – 3.30pm Panel 12, Conference Room
Memory, Art, and Identity in the 21st Century Je m’appelle Dreyfus, je suis juive (My name is Dreyfus, I am a Jew). Sites/Sights of Trauma: Autobiography, Photography and Representation Ella Dreyfus, National Art School, Sydney This paper reports on practice-led research for a visual arts exhibition titled Je m’appelle Dreyfus, je suis juive (My name is Dreyfus, I am a Jew), which investigates contested sites of trauma and the experiences of children and families who were hidden during the Holocaust. The memories of trauma linger in the atmosphere, embodying and inhabiting specific locations, leaving their mark upon the psychological and physical environment in which they occurred. The work focuses on the researcher’s family name, Dreyfus, in a declaration of Jewish identity, remembrance and resurrection. The research aimed to explore the complexities of the psychic impact of ‘transmitted transgenerational memories’ (Hirsch 2008) experienced by descendants of survivors. In contemporary arts this emotionally difficult terrain can be the subject of representation, forging a new visual language to register the experience of emotionally charged memories of the Holocaust and the way ‘trauma is mediated to us in terms of embodied perception’ (Bennett 2002). The research sought to mediate between the gaps of knowledge, feelings of displacement, vast silences and unspeakable losses of previous generations, by engaging with historical and contemporary Jewish life in the city of Paris, France. The rich interplay of the autobiographical, historical and sociological coalesced to form an artistic production incorporating performance, installation, photography and documentary practices.
Remembering Vichy in Vichy Audrey Mallet, Concordia University Since the end of the war, some of Vichy’s local leaders and residents have expressed legitimate concerns regarding the uses of expressions such as ‘Vichy regime’ or ‘Vichy France’, arguing that the misuse of the term ‘Vichy’ has contributed to tarnishing the city’s image and reputation. Because Vichy was chosen to become France’s capital, a common assumption among some local leaders is that their city is not responsible for the decisions taken there and thus should not have to deal with this national shame. When in Vichy, one cannot fail to notice that there are very few commemorative monuments and explanatory plaques on the walls of the city’s key World War II sites – although the latter are still intact – let alone a museum. In this paper I investigate the pros and cons of exhibiting Vichy in Vichy. I show that despite the numerous challenges such curating work would entail, by designing activities/exhibitions that 1. offer a critical look at the wartime period in general and the role of France in the deportation of French Jews in particular, 2. reflect on the postwar representation of Vichy in Vichy, but also in France and abroad, and 3. ponder the significance of this particular event in today’s France, the city of Vichy might have the 30
potential to open up spaces for dialogue, while, at the same time, working through the city’s ‘poisoned’ heritage. Re-inking the Skin: Affective Spaces of Holocaust Representation Jemma Hefter, University of Melbourne In this paper I will consider whether, and if so, how, artistic representations of the Jewish Holocaust can provide an ‘affective’ space through which to reflect about the lived experience of trauma. In the context of ideas regarding preservation and memory, this paper will draw closely upon the theory relevant to literal art conservation practices as I feel these are productive areas of crossover with memory studies which have not so far been explored. The predominant theory in the exploration of representation and the Holocaust often lies in psychoanalytic theory. There has, however, been little work using affect theory to consider performance art, architecture or other representations of the Jewish Holocaust. If spectators are to be affected by an artwork, or offered an affective space in which to form responses, then the way the Jewish Holocaust is conserved should be explored. Affect theory and theories of conservation can be used in conjunction in order to encourage an open articulation of the past. Through the comparison of a small section of Claude Lanzmann’s epic film Shoah and a shorter, contemporary video art work, 80064, by Polish artist Artur Żmijewski , I will consider how trauma may be re-enacted and how this process might engage the spectator through the theoretical framework of affect and the analysis of literal art conservation practice.
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Presenter Bios Dr Avril Alba is the Roth Lecturer in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney. She teaches and researches in the broad areas of Holocaust and modern Jewish history with a focus on Jewish and Holocaust museums and is currently completing a book-length monograph exploring the largely unexamined topic of museums as sacred spaces (Palgrave MacMillan 2015). From 2002-2011 Avril was the Education Director at the Sydney Jewish Museum where she also served as the Project Director/Curator for the permanent exhibition Culture and Continuity in 2008-09. She continues to serve as the consulting lead curator for the museum’s permanent Holocaust exhibition. Avril’s other research interests include Australian Holocaust memory, the ‘activist’ museum, onsite Holocaust education and pre-war Jewish museums and exhibitions. Email:
[email protected] Eltayeb Ali was a teacher at a secondary school in the small town Tawila, in the Darfur region of Sudan. When the Janjaweed militia and Sudanese army attacked Tawila in 2004, he was forced to flee and live in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp. In 2007, when he moved to the capital city of Khartoum in the hope of starting a new life, he was constantly harassed by government security officials who targeted anyone from Darfur. He was falsely accused of alliance with the rebels and feared for his safety. He left for Indonesia in 2011. All alone, with no support and language barriers, he then left for Malaysia and registered as a refugee under the UNHCR program. However, in Malaysia he found himself facing discrimination as a black man and decided to return to Indonesia when offered a trip to Australia. After seven arduous days at sea, the Australian navy took him and other refugees on the boat to a Darwin detention centre. He has been living in Melbourne since July 2013. Jo Besley is a doctoral candidate and tutor in the Museum Studies Programme at the University of Queensland, Australia, studying the representation of trauma in Australian museums. She was formerly Senior Curator of Social History at both the Queensland Museum and Museum of Brisbane and currently undertakes curatorial work at the Ration Shed Museum in Cherbourg and for Courage to Care, a travelling exhibition and bystander intervention program that features survivors of the Holocaust and their rescuers. Most of her museum work has been in collaboration with communities and has involved subjects such as LGBTQ histories, mental health, institutionalisation, organ donation and political protest. Email:
[email protected] Dr Adam Brown is a Lecturer in Media Studies at Deakin University, Australia, and works as a volunteer at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne. He is the author of Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the ‘Grey Zone’ (Berghahn, 2013) and co-author of Communication, New Media and Everyday Life (Oxford UP, 2012). Intensely interested in animal and human rights issues, Adam’s interdisciplinary research has spanned Holocaust representation across various genres, gender and film, mediations of rape, digital children’s television, and board game culture. Further information about Adam can be found on Twitter, YouTube, Academia, and his personal website. Email:
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Dr Alessandro Carrieri is a Research Fellow in Holocaust Studies at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Trieste, Italy, and a Visiting Academic at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism of the Technische University, Berlin. He gained a PhD in Social Science, Philosophy and History at the University of Insubria, Italy. His latest publications are: Lagermusik e resistenza. Viktor Ullmann e Gideon Klein a Theresienstadt, Silvio Zamorani Editore, Torino, 2013 and The Voice of Resistance in Concentrationary Music in «Political Perspectives» 2013, vol. 7 (2). Email:
[email protected] Sandra E. Chestnutt is the President and Chair of the Board of the Darfur Australia Network. Sandra joined DAN in February 2013 after returning to Australia in November 2012. Prior to her return, Sandra managed the Merlin Medical Relief South Darfur Primary Health Care Program for two-and-a-half years – a program that delivered vital health services to the most vulnerable people in South Darfur. Sandra previously worked with the Federal Government as the Assistant State Manager (WA & ACT/NSW) for DCITA/DEWHA for Indigenous Arts programs, and as the National Executive Director YWCA PNG & Country Program Manager Solomon Islands, Save the Children Australia. Sandra worked extensively as a United Nations Volunteer, initially for the East Timor Popular Consultation 1999 and remaining until 2001 with the responsibility of rebuilding Dili, the capital of East Timor. She formed part of the team supervising the first Cambodian Civil Registration after Pol Pot in the province of Takeo and went on to be part of the first Liberian elections after 14 years of civil war in 2005. Sandra is committed to volunteering, all forms of human rights and equity, and continues to live her commitment. Email:
[email protected] Dr Danielle Christmas is a Visiting Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2014) and a Postdoctoral Fellow in American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2014-2016). Her manuscript, ‘Auschwitz and the Plantation: Labor and Social Death in American Holocaust and Slavery Fiction’, concerns how representations of Holocaust and slavery perpetrators contribute to American socioeconomic discourses. She has taught and published on topics ranging from American narratives of Nazi fugitives to the so-called African Hottentot Venus Saartje Baartman. Most recently, her article on William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner will appear in the journal Twentieth-Century Literature (2014). You can find out more about Danielle’s work at her website, www.daniellechristmas.com. Email:
[email protected] Dr Mirna Cicioni is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She taught Italian language, linguistics and culture for over thirty years in tertiary institutions in the UK and Australia. She has published an introductory monograph on Primo Levi (Primo Levi – Bridges of Knowledge, 1995) and co-edited Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture (with Nicole Prunster, 1993) and Differences, Deceits and Desires: Murder and Mayhem in Italian Crime Fiction (with Nicoletta Di Ciolla, 2008). She has written several articles and book chapters on Italian women’s movements and on post-World War II Italian Jewish writers (Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni, Aldo Zargani). She is currently working on two book chapters on linguistic aspects of Levi’s writings and a monograph on autobiography and humour in the works of Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Aldo Zargani. Email:
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Dr Steven Cooke is a Lecturer in Cultural Heritage at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. His background is in cultural and historical geography and he has published widely on issues relating to the memorial landscapes of war and genocide, museums and national identity and maritime heritage and urban redevelopment. He worked in senior positions in the heritage sector for a number of years before moving to Deakin where he is Course Director for the Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies postgraduate programs. He is currently cowriting a history of the Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne, to mark its 30th Anniversary. Email:
[email protected] Philip Cookson is the CEO and Director of Research at Philology Pty. Ltd., which designs and creates interactive digital media solutions leveraging the latest PC and mobile device technologies. Philology was responsible for the development and implementation of the Jewish Holocaust Centre’s interactive technology (2011 MAGNA Award Winner), and the recently released JHC StoryPod iPhone/iPad applications (2013 Melbourne Design Finalist Mobile Applications), which communicate survivor narratives in an interactive form. Email:
[email protected] Dr Ned Curthoys is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Western Australia. His most recent publication is The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation (Berghahn Books, 2013). He has published on critical debates in Holocaust representation and Jewish studies in a variety of journals including Comparative Literature Studies, Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History, Theory and Event, and New Formations. Email:
[email protected] Dr Laura De Becker is the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa, Wits Art Museum, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa). She undertook her PhD in the Arts and Anthropology of Africa through the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UK). Email:
[email protected] Lia Deromedi is a PhD candidate working with Professor Robert Eaglestone at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her dissertation focuses on children in Holocaust fiction written by survivors. Lia earned a BA degree in Literature/Writing at the University of California-San Diego in 2007 and in 2010 she completed a MA in English Literature at the City University of New York-Brooklyn College, where she wrote a thesis on Primo Levi. Email:
[email protected] Dr Ella Dreyfus is a Visual Artist, Senior Lecturer and Head of Public Programs at the National Art School, Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral thesis Shame and the Aesthetics of Intimacy: Three contemporary artworks (University of NSW, 2012) showed how affects can be foregrounded within contemporary art to provide intimate and aesthetic encounters, leading to the development of new relationships between artists, subjects and spectators. In this practice-based research three new exhibitions were created which critically analysed how emotional, physical and cultural shame could be transformed from being a negative affect into a productive and creative force. The doctoral artworks included Weight and Sea, Scumbag, To see beyond what seems to be and I forgive you every day. Dreyfus is an awardwinning artist, known for her photographic exhibitions and monographs The Body Pregnant, Age and Consent, Transman and Under Twelve, Under Twenty. She won the Olive Cotton 34
Award for Photographic Portraiture in 2005 and was an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholar. Her new research Je m’appelle Dreyfus, je suis juive was undertaken during an Artist’s Residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris in 2013. For more details refer to the full curriculum vitae and website www.elladreyfus.com. Email:
[email protected] Gretel Evans completed her Honours thesis at the University of Southern Queensland in 2013. Her research project used emotion and memory studies to examine how British Former Child Migrants remembered and reconstructed their past experiences. Gretel has also participated in archaeology projects in Australia and Macedonia and worked as a tutor for Indigenous students at the University of Southern Queensland, and is now pursuing a PhD at the University of Melbourne examining migrant experiences of natural disasters. Email:
[email protected] Dr John Fox lectures in social work at Victoria University, Melbourne, and works to promote a better recognition of the significance of the body and material world in social theory, social policy and social work. His research focuses on ways in which bodily experience can reveal the limitations of, and suggest alternatives to, dominant ideas of humanity and social interaction. John currently focuses on Adorno’s works in relation to the Holocaust, including how everyday forms of thought and practice enabled its implementation. In particular, he looks to explore Adorno’s consideration of the longstanding Western devaluation of bodily experience, how that devaluation contributed to the Holocaust, and how a more constructive valuation of bodily experience might be developed and help prevent inhumane and oppressive conduct in the future. Email:
[email protected] Trent Griffiths is a PhD candidate at Deakin University, Melbourne, researching the intersections of subjectivity and authorship in contemporary documentary film. He has coedited with Keith Beattie an upcoming collection of interviews with D.A. Pennebaker for University Press of Mississippi, published book reviews in Senses of Cinema and Studies in Documentary Film, and presented at Screen Futures (Melbourne 2011), Expanding Documentary (Auckland 2011), Powers of the False (London 2012), and Visible Evidence XIX (Canberra 2012). Email:
[email protected] Jemma Hefter is currently completing her PhD in Cultural Studies at The University of Melbourne. Email:
[email protected] Dr Esther Jilovsky is currently a Research Fellow in the German Studies program at the University of Melbourne. Her research concerns narratives of memory and trauma across generations, with a particular focus on the Holocaust and the Stasi. Her book Remembering the Holocaust: Generations, Witnessing and Place will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2014. Email:
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Brian Johnsrud is finishing his PhD in Stanford’s interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Before coming to Stanford he received Master’s degrees in Media Studies, Medieval Literature, and Cultural Anthropology, the latter two at the University of Oxford. Brian’s research considers how the Crusades and other violent histories have served as popular metaphors for relations between the U.S. and Middle East since the First Gulf War and even more so after 9/11. In particular, he explores how those analogies are employed and mediated to affect realms like U.S. national intelligence reports, conspiracy theory novels like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, genetic ancestry studies conducted by IBM and National Geographic’s Genographic Project in Lebanon, and Iraqi primary school textbook revision by the U.S. after 2003. Brian’s research interests in digital humanities have led to a platform he is currently developing through a collaboration between Stanford University, UCLA, and MIT: www.LacunaStories.com. The mixed-media, online platform creates a collaborative research ecosystem for academics, students, and the general public to engage with and respond to texts, media, and other resources related to 9/11. Email:
[email protected] Jayne Josem is Curator and Head of Collections at the Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne, where she has been since 2001, following completion of a Masters in Public History at Monash University. Jayne completed the total overhaul of the JHC’s permanent museum display in 2010 and has recently worked on projects to enhance the Centre’s videotestimony collection and create cutting-edge digital media technologies, including digital StoryPod applications which communicate survivor narratives in an interactive form. Email:
[email protected] Matt Lawson is a funded doctoral candidate in musicology and Graduate Teaching Assistant at Edge Hill University in northern England. Matt’s research focus is a comparative study of film scores used in East, West and reunified German films based upon the Holocaust. He has presented his early research concepts at international conferences in Germany, Italy and Poland as well as at conferences throughout the UK. Email:
[email protected] Tom Lawson is Professor of History at Northumbria University in the UK. He is the author and editor of several books including: The Church of England and the Holocaust (2006); Debates on the Holocaust (2010); and with James Jordan The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia (2008). His most recent book, The Last Man: a British genocide in Tasmania, was published by IB Tauris in February 2014. He is also the co-editor of Holocaust Studies: a journal of culture and history. Email:
[email protected] Paul MacDonald is a PhD candidate at Macquarie University under the supervision of the director of Macquarie’s Centre for Media History, Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley. His current research is focusing on how media organisations shaped and constructed Holocaust narratives that arose out of the screening of major films and TV series in the United States from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. Paul’s previous research, undertaken at the University of Auckland, examined the place of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Holocaust historiography and the portrayal of the trial in various newspapers around the world. Email:
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LJ Maher is a Lecturer in Literature at Deakin University, where she teaches genre studies, and supernatural literature. She is completing her PhD through Monash University, and her research focuses on readers’ engagement with transmedial life-writing, and the regulation of these engagements under Australian copyright law. She has previously written about the intersection between law and literature, particularly in relation to Australian engagements with vergangenheitsbewältigung, and trauma testimony. Email:
[email protected] Audrey Mallet is a PhD candidate in the Ecole doctorale d’histoire at Paris I PanthéonSorbonne and the history department at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). Her doctoral research focuses on the history and memory of Vichy in Vichy (her hometown). Audrey holds a B.A. in English Studies (Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France) and an M.A. in History (Concordia University). Email:
[email protected] Abdelhadi Matar’s memories of Darfur before the war were of a basic life, but a content one. Abdelhadi moved to El Geneina where he met his future wife, Zahra. He opposed the government’s encouragement of non-Darfuri people settling on Darfuri land without permission. As a result, he was targeted by the Sudanese Government and jailed for one-anda-half years. He fled by camel to Libya, where he stayed from 1997 to 1999, then travelled to Egypt where he remained for one year while awaiting approval of his refugee status. In 2000, Abdelhadi arrived in Australia full of hope, but wary of the challenges ahead. He had five Australian dollars in his pocket and his wife, Zahra, was four months pregnant with their first child. The welcoming nature of Australians reminded him of the friends he had left behind. The support of the Australian people has heartened Abdelhadi, but he feels that ‘My journey is still not finished because the situation is still ongoing. I have family and friends that are still there and I worry about them.’ Abdelhadi is a founding member of DAN and is a local community leader. Dr Deborah Mayersen is a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong. Deborah is a historian, and her research interests are in comparative genocide studies. Email:
[email protected] Dr Allen Meek is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. He is the author of Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories and Images (Routledge 2010). He is currently researching how events such as the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima have lead cultural theorists to develop new narratives about identity and memory, and how these narratives both illuminate and obscure the politicisation of biological life. Email:
[email protected] Sally Morgan is an experienced secondary teacher, committed to a self-reflective pedagogy. She is the curriculum writer for the ‘Vanishing Point: Encounters with Conflict and Peace’ project, based on the award-winning multi-media www.rwandanstories.org website. Over the past three years she has been training teachers and students in Australia about the Rwandan genocide and post-genocide justice processes. She has ongoing connection with Rwandans who have shared their stories with the Vanishing Point team, with the express purpose of educating young people across the globe. In 2014, she will also draw on Rwandan stories in
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her role as teacher and curriculum coordinator in a Flexible Learning Centre with marginalised young people. Email:
[email protected] Dr Julian Novitz is a fiction writer and an academic. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne and is a Lecturer in Writing at Swinburne University of Technology. Email:
[email protected] Kim Roberts is an architect and cultural heritage consultant with an abiding interest in literature as a field of spatial and cultural expression. She is a PhD candidate at Deakin University in Australia. Her research focuses on the real and imagined, localised and globalised space of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Email:
[email protected] Michael Roux is currently a Member of the Presidential Advisory Council Rwanda; Honorary Consul-General of Rwanda in Australia; Member of the Asialink Advisory Council; Founding Chairman of Roux International; Founder of Australian Davos Connection; Member of World Economic Forum Alumni, and Advisory Board Member of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Dr Adrian Schober received his PhD in English from Monash University, Australia, and is the author of Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film: Contrary States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). His research interests include children’s literature, Hitchcock, romanticism and the child in the horror genre and his articles appear in Literature/Film Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn (forthcoming) and The Journal of Popular Culture (forthcoming). As well as lecturing in different aspects of literature and film, he serves on the editorial board of Red Feather: An International Journal of Children’s Visual Culture. Email:
[email protected] Kirril Shields is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland and his thesis examines the ethics of representing the Third Reich with impiety. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales where his studies centred on the nationalism present in Peter Carey’s writing. In 2013 Kirril was a recipient of an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and in 2014 he was a Fellow at the Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilisation, London. Kirril is the current Alfred Midgley Scholar at the University of Queensland. Email:
[email protected] Sean Sidky received his Bachelor of Arts (Honours, First Class) from the University of Sydney in 2013. He was awarded the University Medal for his Honours research on the Holocaust memoirs of Elie Wiesel. He has presented papers on this research in a number of settings, including an invited lecture series at the Sydney Jewish Museum. He is currently applying for Doctoral programs in Holocaust, and comparative literature. Email:
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Dr Hsu-Ming Teo is a novelist and cultural historian based at Macquarie University. Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), Cultural History in Australia (2003), and a range of articles and book chapters on the history of Orientalism, travel, British imperialism, fiction, and popular culture. Email:
[email protected] Elizabeth Ward is a final-year PhD student at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. Her thesis examines the depiction of Jewish persecution during the Third Reich in East German cinema in which she considers how narratives of racial persecution were presented within the context of a country whose official narrative of the past unwaveringly privileged political persecution. She also has a particular interest in the use of film in the delivery of German studies in schools and has recently completed work on a project aimed at developing German skills among secondary school pupils through film. Email:
[email protected] Dr Deb Waterhouse-Watson is a Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. The author of Athletes, Sexual Assault and ‘Trials by Media: Narrative Immunity (Routledge, 2013), Deb’s research interests include gender and representation in Holocaust film, the news media, and other popular cultural texts, board game culture, and representations of sexual violence. Further details can be found on Deb’s Academia profile. Email:
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